


It's a Battle of Words (And Most of Them Are Blind)

by mynameisnemo



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Episode: s01e01 Pilot, Gen, Genderqueer Character, Stanford Era, Wee!chesters, teen!chesters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-06
Updated: 2014-12-06
Packaged: 2018-02-28 09:38:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,217
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2727551
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mynameisnemo/pseuds/mynameisnemo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Turns out just because most of the time a word was mostly just talk if it wasn’t said in Latin, didn’t mean that sometimes words couldn’t come true.</p>
            </blockquote>





	It's a Battle of Words (And Most of Them Are Blind)

_Dreams do come true, if only we wish hard enough. You can have anything in life if you will sacrifice everything else for it.  
J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan_

\- - -

It started just after Sammy found out about the truth.

Dad was angry that Sam found out, but seemed relieved at the same time. He didn’t have to hide things anymore; didn’t have to try to answer more questions about why he couldn’t just have a normal job where they didn’t have to move all the time. It didn’t last long, but for a little while there was peace on that front. 

Meanwhile, despite the ceasefire between Sammy and Dad, Deanna found herself in a whole new world. 

She was used to taking care of Sam, used to taking care of Dad when he was around, used to the constant knowledge of the real dangers of the world and the moving and the training and everything else that came with being Deanna Winchester. 

She was not used to her own body betraying her. 

She supposed, later on, that she should have seen it coming. The school in Indiana had a sex ed class in 7th grade where they separated the kids one day during gym class and explained abstinence and menstrual cycles and the like, and she heard other girls talking about getting boobs and periods and which boys were the cutest. 

Still, the pains in her chest could just have been from training. She knew she was getting chubbier, but for a long time, she thought she was just going to grow again. Dad was tall, she would be too, and she’d been watching Sam gain weight and then inches his whole life. 

Still, the morning she woke up to blood in her underwear it took thirty minutes in the bathroom before she could calm down enough to assess the situation. 

Luckily, Sam was still asleep. She’d kept him up late watching Romero movies because the motel had decent cable for once, and the big baby had been too scared to sleep for hours after. Dad was gone for at least another day, and she wasn’t going to bring it up to him anyway, so she just slipped out the door after grabbing the room key and headed to the front office. 

Luckily, the couple who ran the front desk split the shifts, so it was the wife watching telenovelas behind the counter when Deanna stood on tiptoes to look over. The woman was older, old enough to have more grey hair than brown, and to just nod in understanding when Deanna stuttered out an explanation of what she needed and how her mother wasn’t there right now and how she couldn’t ask her dad. 

Luckily, they were staying in room 211 and the stairwell was the perfect place to pause, doubled over and panting, as she tried to hold the tears back. She clutched the plastic Walmart bag of ‘supplies’ to her chest and told herself it would be fine, Dad didn’t need to know, she could hide them in the bottom of her duffle. 

Luck had nothing to do with it, she decided, using the bottom of her T-shirt to scrub her face dry before heading back to the room and starting breakfast. When had Winchesters ever had luck? This was just one more thing that sucked but couldn’t be changed. 

Six months later, two things happened that changed everything. 

She was thirteen. Dad decided that was old enough for her first salt and burn. She was thrilled to man the flashlight and the shotgun as Dad dug the grave; terrified when the ghost, stronger than either of them anticipated, threw Dad against a headstone hard enough that he didn’t just get back up again; and absolutely furious when the poltergeist managed to yank an entire chunk of her long sandy hair from her scalp. She was also self aware enough to realise that there would never be a bigger rush than dropping the lit matchbook into the grave and watching the spirit spark out of existence. 

That night she wrapped Dad’s chest tight enough to keep his broken ribs from shifting and noticed that it squished everything down flat under his shirt, even making the muscles kind of nonexistent. It sparked an idea that would take weeks for her to get the courage on which to act. 

Dad was on another hunt, one that was ‘too dangerous’ for Deanna to go on. She was stuck with Sammy in the hotel room for the duration but it was the perfect time to try her idea. It took nearly three hours to figure out how to wrap the bandages right. First they kept unraveling, then they were too tight and she couldn’t breathe. Finally, she could slide a T-shirt and a flannel over the bandages, and it was hard to see the bulge. She had finally managed to flatten out her chest enough that it looked like she didn’t have one. 

Once she was satisfied with her clothes she took the medical kit scissors and hacked off as much hair as she could with them. She was standing in front of the bathroom mirror when Sam came in, apparently bored with whatever book he had been reading to himself in the living room. 

“Dee, what are you doing?” 

Sam wound up helping her clean up the back of her hair with the clippers the same way Deanna had always helped Dad when he needed a trim. 

They snuck out after lunch and set fire to the hair in the woods behind the motel. Deanna never told Sam why they had to burn the long strands of blond but to her it was always an ending, a cleansing. 

Dad hit the roof when he came home to find his eldest child standing in the kitchen wearing one of his shirts and a badly shorn crew cut. He shipped both of them off to Bobby’s again until school started, but the feeling it gave Deanna when Sam or Bobby would run their hands over the soft bristles was worth it.

\- - - 

Over the next couple of years Deanna felt like a sponge that had been put back into the bucket a few too many times. There was hunting lore to learn, weapons training, Latin, rituals, and how to keep from getting in trouble with the law. There was credit card scams and hustling pool or poker and the right kind of push ups to do to get broader shoulders. There was mechanics and algebra and tracking and how to keep the person you were making out with from shoving their hand down your jeans looking for something that wasn’t there.

At 16 Deanna was left for more than a week with Sammy in the motel room. Dad hadn’t been thinking straight when he left, hadn’t left close to the amount of money to feed both of them and pay the rent for that many days. 

What he probably didn’t know was that over and above PB&J for two teenagers, it was also time for a monthly supply run and 6 days of stolen motel toilet paper wasn’t going to cut it. 

Deanna bet smart, poker was a game of odds, and the chances of beating a straight flush wasn’t high. 

Of course, losing everything to a royal straight flush couldn’t be anticipated. 

A week later the only thought in Deanna’s mind was that there was no accounting for how unlucky a person could be as Sonny illustrated how well-versed he could be in the third degree. Then again, there was no accounting for how wrong a person could be either. 

It took another week for Sonny to notice something was off with the new kid. At first he was just on the look out for something more than the forearm bruises he had already seen. Dean was shy about sharing bathrooms, closed off, weirdly ritualistic, and constantly looked down and to the right as if he expected his shadow to start asking questions. 

It was after a trip to the pond when Dean wouldn’t strip out of his shirt and jeans to swim that Sonny finally put it together. 

Deanna never expected someone like Sonny to figure things out. It was definitely beyond all expectations that the revelation would be met with nothing but a suggestion to wear shorts and T-shirt to swim in and no further commentary. That month was the most free Deanna had ever felt.

\- - - 

Around the end of junior year Dean had finally convinced the rest of the school that the last two letters of his name were a typo. He had slept with two girls without ever taking off his clothes, killed enough ghosts to be upgraded to the occasional revenant or ghoul, and could take apart any part of the Impala and put it back together better than it started.

Dad met the new introduction of “I’m Dean” with nothing but a raised eyebrow and the announcement that there was no graduation in Dean’s future but a GPA certificate had been delivered to Bobby’s address with the Impala’s car keys. 

On Dean’s 18th birthday he got a concussion, a broken arm, and a lacerated spleen (courtesy a seriously pissed off poltergeist), a new set of shocks and a torque wrench (Bobby), and a bottle of whiskey from Dad. 

He also got a binder and a stack of pamphlets on testosterone and gender reassignment surgery from Sam. Giving up the possibility of using the second set of Sam’s pamphlets due to the first, he made good use of the bottle. Maybe that was how he wound up puking like a freshman in the bathroom at 3am, wearing nothing but the binder and a pair of loose fitting jeans, with Sam sitting on the other side of the door holding a water bottle and humming ‘Smoke on the Water’. 

The next couple of years flew by in a haze of smoke filled bars, shovel shredded hands, and what Dean would look back on for a long time as the best period of his life. 

Sam and Dad fought almost constantly when they were together but Dean knew things would work out. Dad got into it with Bobby to the point of being warned off with a shotgun but the night Dean found himself at his wits end with a transplanted Romanian water spirit and an unconscious father the older hunter still picked up the phone and gave him the knowledge to get the banishment done. 

The Impala started to run rough but they took enough time off over May for Sam to graduate that Dean could do a full carb rebuild and a block overhaul and Sammy spent every warm spring afternoon pouring over textbooks and pouring out lemonade while Dean got good and greasy. 

Summer hit hard a few months later and for the first time in years Dean felt like his world was shaking apart. 

It was the little words at first. _“Something else. Not hunting. Stability. A life of my own.”_

They headed north, right up to the border, and Dean got up close and personal with a wall thanks to another vengeful spirit. He also got up close and personal with words that started to change from _”Something different.”_ to _”College.”_

They headed south again and he learned a new word: _”Stanford.”_ Who knew eight little letters could invoke so much feeling. 

At first Dean didn’t believe in an idea that could change things so much. His entire life was about words that weren’t as scary or real as the boogeyman was. (Right before Sam’s 17th birthday, 48 hours of work, blessed iron, 15 stitches to the scalp due to a forcefully launched bookend. No big deal.) Words like death, female, impossible, they had all been proven to be meaningless time and time again. 

Turns out just because most of the time a word was mostly just talk if it wasn’t said in Latin, didn’t mean that sometimes words couldn’t come true.

The first time Dean heard the word Stanford he was relieved. Stanford was just another unattainable word right up there with “mom” and “revenge” and “male”. 

Soon came the thick envelope that proved that some words do come true. 

Sam left, then Dad started leaving for longer and longer, started slipping up sometimes when he was around and wasted on whiskey, started adding those two hated letters to the end of Dean’s name.

\- - - 

Four years later Dean is toweling off his hair after showering the smell of the disgusting Jericho river water away and Sam looks up from the mess he’s making of Dad’s research.

“Whoa, guess things haven’t changed much.” 

Dean looks down to see what Sam is gesturing at and doesn’t see anything out of place. There’s bare feet and comfortable jeans and the offwhite of a worn in binder and the amulet Sam gave him all those years ago. 

“What?”

Sam shakes his head, hair too long and brushing over his eyes, blushing a little as he gestures at Dean’s chest. “I just figured, you know, after all this time…”

Dean throws the towel onto the bed and picks up the T-shirt he laid out before showering. “I’m still me, that’s not going to change.”

**Author's Note:**

> The title is a misheard quote from Us and Them by Pink Floyd.  
> Beta work done by [Henry](https://twitter.com/HFBIII) and the ever lovely [Katrina](http://hell-aint-complicated.tumblr.com).


End file.
